The Honor and Glory of Being Cold

(Rockwell Kent's print of The Spouter Inn, scene of much coziness.)

“We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of your much be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of the sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

—Chapter 11: The Nightgown, Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville—

(obviously, but this sub-sub librarian does love to cite a source)

Despite an unfortunate run-in or two with frostbite, I love winter and the cold. To feel, with every breath, the sharp contrast between the cold air and the warmth of being alive is to become more aware of life. Some people go to yoga classes and meditation retreats to learn mindfulness. I go outside in winter.

Staring at winter stars while my eyeballs freeze is no small source of joy. There is the tremendous enormity against my fragile humanity, there is the whiplash of cold against the knowledge that I’ll be warm again soon. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. And beyond the “luxurious discomforts of the rich,” there is the luxurious comfort of being rich enough to choose to encounter a little cold, with the safety net that warmth is possible.

In Denmark, there is a cultural term “hygge,” that roughly translates to the idea of being cozy from the inside out. To be beside a fire, drinking hot beverages with a loved one, while the Danish winter darkens outside would be hygge. To run into an old friend in a surprising place would be hygge. I like to think of it as any time the “warm spark in the heart” is kindled, particularly in contrast with conditions—personal or external—that could be considered “an arctic crystal.”

The simplicity of the comfort at the Spouter Inn—just a couple of dudes cozying up for the night, swapping stories, with thin blankets and body heat and friendship their defense against the ice on the inside of the windows—seems even more delicious in contrast with where they go next.

Most of the time I have spent on boats has been in summer, and even then a geographically appropriate dampness pervaded everything. Whaling—even aside from the whale slaughter operations themselves—sounds incredibly uncomfortable. Sleeping on a ship, for three years at a stretch, sharing these close quarter with the same crew of increasingly odiferous gentlemen (I’ve heard that after a winter in a logging camp, the men had to cut their long underwear off because it had become glued to their bodies with a paste of sweat and dead skin and can’t imagine that whalers were much different than loggers in regards to personal hygiene) and all the while pitching and rolling on a creaking vessel through any and all possible weather, none of this is as rosy a picture as that of Ishmael and Queequeg being hygge in bed.

The pleasure, as Melville says, is in the contrast. A short blaze of comfort amid the discomfort or a reminder of discomfort in the midst of comfort staves of stagnation and boredom. In being aware of the contradictions and contrasts of every moment of life, I think we are closest to perfect happiness simply because of the imperfections. 

And, when the cold of New England winters starts to grate on my nerves, I think about this passage and begin, again to kindle my spark for all things against the arctic days.

Whales Against Humanity?

A wonderful friend sent me this today. And, it wasn't even the only joke about Moby-Dick I heard today. Stay tuned for those funnies!

Gone to the Chapel

(Rockwell Kent's illustration, via the Plattsburg State Art Museum)

"Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets..."

Moby-Dick, The Chapel

I have wonderful, agreeable, intellectually curious and kind friends. Two such souls agreed that the finest way to spend the first Saturday of the New Year was to trek down to New Bedford and attend the New Bedford Whaling Museum's annual Moby-Dick Marathon. 

Because what could be more fun than 135 chapters, read aloud, in 25 hours? One of these dear friends said that she was happy to go, and happier to go with me, because it was like spending Christmas with a little kid, such was my particular and somewhat inexplicable joy at the adventure.

(We didn't stay for the whole show. Even I, at least as of yet, am not up to that sort of voyage.) 

However, we did manage to arrive just in time for the reading of Father Mapple's sermon at the Seaman’s Bethel. It was one of the pieces I most wanted to hear, and—as I am unlikely to find myself on the open ocean in a whaleboat ringed with a bower and nursery of sperm whales—one of my best-loved scenes of the book that I can easily access.

Being slightly younger and more easily mobile than much of the crowd attending the reading, my friends and I arrived, like Ishmael, before the sermon began. We looked around at the tablets on the wall—my personal favorite was one erected by the New Bedford Seafood Council and dedicated to "Port of New Bedford Fishermen Who Died at Sea." As it is likely that those lost at sea became seafood themselves for sharks—with their natures yet ungoberned towards the angelic—this commemoration pleased both my dark sense of humor and ecological justice. 

As the reader-Father Mapple-impersonator strode to and then climbed up the ship’s prow pulpit, I looked around the chapel. In most things, my sense of reverence comes from sharing and observing. I don’t haul the ladder up behind me to be alone with whatever is beautiful and holy—I keep doors and eyes open and look around at all that is. In churches, I look at people praying. At readings of beautiful books that are some sort of strangely holy totemic text for a peculiar strain of literati, I look around at who else is there—who are these shipmates of mine? It’s like meeting someone in the mountains—there is a similar hue of the heart that leads people to common ground, and even if it is unspoken, I believe in that undercurrent of connectivity between strangers at such times and in such places.

The sweetest thing in that chapel, as a saltier take on Jonah’s attempt to wiggle out of Destiny was delivered from the pulpit, was the number of people who had brought their own copies of Moby-Dick and were reading along. I counted six or seven different editions, not including e-readers and iPads. Some were frilled out with tabs and notes, some were newer, some had woodcuts, some had covers that looked like Jaws knockoffs, or gilt pages, or leathered spines like Ahab or Moby’s skin, or the plastic covers of a library book, and so on.

But for each person, the book and their own book, meant enough to bring along to the public, communal reading.

For someone who doesn’t subscribe to any official faith, I think a lot about the subject. I believe that we all have touchstones and talismans and any manner of objects and rituals to keep us going. Maybe we’re all steadfast islands and maybe we’re not, but it is in the interplay between individual and communal that there is something beautiful I believe in.

Next year, I want to bring a camera to New Bedford and ask to take pictures of people with their books, to learn why they brought their own Koran to Mecca, as it were.

Perhaps there is no articulable reason, but the act alone is beautiful enough to be noticed. And shining a little light on what we share, bridging the distance between our own islands of being, I think that this will in the end only make us all a little richer, as well as sweeten our own individuality. The sheepishly joyful noise as everyone in the chapel rumbled and shuffled our feet when instructed—becoming party to the text—makes me think we’d be even more gleeful together.

The Beauty of Insignificance

Bill Watterson drew Calvin & Hobbes brilliantly. I think of this particular strip, often, when trying to explain how it feels to be in the presence of wildness, to encounter all and anything—from being caught in a blizzard to realizing you love another human—that is greater than yourself.

My own personal, current, obsession with Moby-Dick has more than a little to do with my eternal magnetic attraction to the wild unknowns that are greater than one single person or single life. Feeling small in the presence of something wildly beautiful takes my breath away, in a good way.

Like Ahab, we’re all limping and striving along after something huge. And the hugeness, the wild things, the further shores and galaxies far far away and quests we can’t even begin to understand we’re on until pieces collide into place, all of that is wrapped up—to me—in wildness. It’s in the night sky, the sea, the enormity of an ecosystem, the miracle and brevity of life, the eternity of the mountains, and so on.

Because, against the backdrop off that HUGENESS, our own lives are glacially insignificant, and so can be better seen and known and cherished for the brief jewels that they are. We’re the dusk specks in the constellations, the lone crazy old man against the mystery of one white whale in all the ocean, the needle the haystack. In our insignificance is our specialness, our worth.

In all things, I like to elbow up against these bigger, wilder, more eternal forces. This book—in subject and in its grown mythos—is one such piece of all that.

Being small, like this, seems as if it would be the loneliest thing in the world. And it might be, if the huge and wild things did not cartwheel through all our lives in some way, until we are variously caught and find ourselves banded merrily little and together beside the wild and huge we love. There is a particular joy in finding that something you love is also beloved by others. The communities that rise out of these convergences of individual and infinite are just one more wonderful thing that is greater than each of our own mortal selves.

(On that note, I am delighted to head to the New Bedford Whaling Museum tomorrow for their annual Moby-Dick Marathon. I figure, if there is one place and time to be around other people who giggle over Herman Melville’s sense of humor, this would be it. It’s like a gam, really—all we particularly Moby-Dick fascinated people who try to pull our ships up to others for a chat, but everyone else has different protocols and interests suddenly come across each other, pull up alongside, and have a whale of a good time!!)